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A recent paper published in the PNAS, "Expert credibility in climate change" is being used as propaganda to claim that 97% of all climate scientists agree with the IPCC and the need for government action on climate change. An analysis of this paper does not support these conclusions.

PNAS reviewers and author's William R. L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold and Stephen H. Schneider are apparently Google Scholar illiterate since searching for just the word "climate" with an author's name will bring results from non-peer-reviewed sources such as books, magazines, newspapers, patents, citations, duplicate listings and all sorts of other erroneous results. Such as 16,000 from the Guardian, 52,000 from Newsweek and 115,000 from the New York Times. There is no "peer-reviewed journal only" search option in Google Scholar.

Cherry Picking:

It is clear the authors cherry picked away skeptics using subjective criteria,

"we imposed a 20 climate-publications minimum to be considered a climate researcher."

So if a scientist published only 19 or less papers on the climate he is not considered an "expert". They did this intentionally as they noted,

Volume of publications does not indicate scientific truth nor does it denote expertise. It cannot be ignored that skeptics extensively publish peer-reviewed papers so they have to use this propaganda to subjectively define "experts". An objective criteria for determining if an author has done climate research would be if an author has or has not published a paper on the climate. Expertise is simply an opinion and who is considered an expert will change based on who you talk to.